Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes five days weekly with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

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22.5.14

It’s the ultimate in windfall
money, but strings attached to some of its use threaten to create a budget
situation where spending the bonus on recurring expenditures ultimately leads
to a tax increase.

HB
1241 by Rep. Cameron
Henry would take money from a resolution of court claims by Louisiana
against BP for various damages because of the Macondo oil spill of 2010 according
to state law (although the case will be heard in federal court), even as the
company is on the hook already to the federal government, state government, and
individual citizens for around $15 billion. No one know what the amount will
be, or when it will be.

But HB 1241 anticipated it will be in the $1 billion range at least and come within the next fiscal year, and
has plans for the dough. Through some legal
machinations, the state is required to cough up about $356 million for the
Budget Stabilization Fund, and even if the proceeds are coming from something
unrelated to a state savings account, in the spirit of the BSF as a repository
of windfall money, that’s an appropriate and none-too-soon, given the legal
imperative, place for it to go.

21.5.14

The paradox about a bill to
reduce contracting costs by Louisiana is that in order to save its intent you
have to destroy its intent.

This session’s HB
142 by state Rep. Dee Richard is
the latest iteration of these efforts from past sessions. Years ago, it started
off as a meat cleaving, indiscriminate 10 percent excision of money spent on
contracting, as determined by agency heads. Even as the Gov. Bobby
Jindal Administration pared some contracting expenses over time, the bill
continued reappearing in evolving form.

This year’s version initially
called for the same 10 percent reduction, although exempting some areas of
government with critical need to contract out certain functions, for a single
year and taking that money and placing into a fund for higher education. This
would put that fund at an estimated $528 million, from which investment
earnings could be used to fund higher education. But with these only in the
$25-50 million range realistically any given year, it was hoped that, after
spending a year on a contracting diet, having realized the world didn’t end as
a result in succeeding years the state would continue the practice and shovel
the dollars not spent to needs of higher priority, where the author and its major
cheerleader Treasurer John
Kennedy hoped higher education would become the beneficiary.

20.5.14

Candidates for Louisiana’s Fifth
Congressional District have started percolating to the surface, with at this
point the only sure things about the election being it won’t be won by
incumbent Rep. Vance McAllister or somebody
with anything like his pedigree.

Besides being heavily in debt
and short on cash,
additionally unsubstantiated rumors about a potential bimbo eruption plaguing
him should more than discourage his participation. And after having announced
deferral to improve familial relations at home, it seems hardly credible that
in a short period such repairs would have been made. Voters will see through
this and gauge his reanimated interest in the office more for power’s sake than
anything else such as genuine desire to serve constituents. He cannot win under
these conditions.

19.5.14

In 1980, a small-budget South
African movie called The Gods Must Be
Crazy hit the big screen. In it, from an airplane flying over a tribal region
of Botswana a Coke bottle was tossed. It lands among the natives who, while finding
it useful, become rent with dissension over it. Believing it came from the gods
who provide everything but feeling compelled to reject the malevolent thing,
one of their own is dispatched to return it to them, with the ensuing hilarity
of someone who never has had contact with anything but primitive cultures
suddenly now coming to grips with the outside world.

If you’ve ever seen the film –
which became the highest grossing foreign film in America at the time – you
can’t help but get the same feeling observing the reactions of the natives in
St. Tammany Parish when confronted with the possibility that somebody might
frac a well into existence on their sacred ground. These natives also have been
blessed by the gods, with wealth (ranking in the top three parishes in the
state in all of per capita, median family, and median household incomes) from
having a major metropolitan area nearby yet a lake to separate them from the
grubbiness of the hoi polloi and all
its problems to the south. They also suddenly have something alien tossed into
their midst, and struggle to fit it into their own paradigm that is detached
from the rest of the world.

18.5.14

A complex constitutional
situation is being made even more complicated by resistance to a bill that may
or may not be necessary, putting Louisiana at the forefront of the evolution of
voting rights that affects Baton Rougeans.

Controversy surrounds HB
1151 by state Rep. Erich Ponti,
which would replace the current districting system of the City Court of Baton Rouge
from single-member districts, presently constituted with three majority-white
and two majority-black subdistricts, to five at-large elected members. The
imperative behind this bill stems from the threat of a federal court order to
dismantle the system – the power of it do so not entirely clear itself.

Until the early 1990s, in fact
the city did have an at-large system. But as a result of court decisions, the
at-large districting system for judicial elections was decided to be
potentially discriminatory, depending upon certain factors that could have come
into play, and so the Legislature changed the law to create the five subdistricts
(and also did so to several other judicial districts in the state). After 2000,
as the city was nearing a black majority, it drew these extant subdistricts. However,
since then, confirmed by the 2010 census, the city now has a black majority population
even as by the numbers three of these remain majority white and two majority
black in population composition.

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